Early Monday morning, America woke to the news of the single deadliest gun massacre in our nation’s history. Phones buzzed in the dawn’s early light with tweets and news notifications alerting their owners of the 273rd mass shooting in the United States this year. Within hours, millions expressed their condolences through heartfelt statements and showed their support through action, such as the thousands who turned out to donate blood in Las Vegas. 

Yet immediately and everywhere, politicians and pundits drew their battle lines, contriving arguments and defensive one-liners to rally their supporters around their respective and distant camps. The same weary debate, now a tired routine of American life, is bound to surface yet again, leaving the same unanswered question in its wake: what do we do about gun violence?

I posit that the answer is this: stop listening to the worn-out political diatribe from our elected members of Congress and begin to form the national conversation ourselves as independently-minded citizens. It’s incredibly easy to form our political positions by regurgitating the reactions of our representatives, but that’s getting the system backwards. That is to say, we should not let the radical opinions of a few dominate the rational conversations of the many.  

The more we look to the impassioned rhetoric of intransigent ideologues on either side of the aisle, the less we are able to see the issue for what it really is. This is not how our system of government was meant to work. While politicians such as Senator Rand Paul (“We will not let liberals tread on the Second Amendment!”) or interest groups like the NRA may appear to their supporters to have the noblest of intentions, their utter disinterest in compromise erodes the fundamental goal of politics: to find common ground. The national conversation has become so inundated with obdurate tripe from pundits, politicians and interest groups, that there is little room for discussion among the people affected most by the lack of governance today. 

We the people must pry the national conversation about gun violence out of the cold hands of those who would rather choke our administration and convulse our society than compromise. We must reject the stalemate and the political spectacle constructed in our legislatures. We must find compromise, though it is not always natural, and we must practice humility, though it is not always easy. And above all else, we must engage with one another in an effort to find a common future.